Oh What a Paradise it Seems by John Cheever

A novella.

Long time ago I read his Collected Stories, and for a while decided not to read more from him. His writing is beautiful but the modern life, the suburbia, the lost feeling of emptiness that it generates, the stories bother you more than provide you solace. I guess that is one way of looking at a reading journey - whether the book or the reading provokes you, agitates you, troubles you or somehow provides solace, or lifts you up. Most great books lift you up - even while dealing with life's miseries, they somehow in the way great art or literature can do, still manage to elevate you, lift you up, provide you some sort of quiet peace, a tranquility in life in whichever shape or form it meets you.

One can also say that in a reading encounter, there's as much of a reader in a book while reading it as there's the writer. Or perhaps not as much, but a lot of the reader's personal landscape finds its way in the reading journey. And hence, somehow books of a different time and place which do not find obvious counterparts in a reader's particularity perhaps provide richer encounters, and hence perhaps too, most great books need that testing by time, a remove from the reader's day and age.

Back to this novella. Here again, like Cheever's other stories, the same desolation at times. The lost purity of life before suburbia, the consuming classes, the burgeoning comforts of Western lifestyle and the commercial aspects of life which encroach on, or dull the purity and simplicity of life. Along with the commercial consumption aspects of modern life, there is detritus and flotsam of  past relationships too in his modern American or America of second-half/ late twentieth century. There is a lot of clutter of modern life - both in things and consumption, and the similar mindset in ways of being with people. It leaves people empty, devoid of some simplicity, lost in the clutter. 

What is the way out? One has to think here, that again, because it is simplicity that we are talking about, it can be found almost anywhere, but needs a cleansing of mind, a resetting of expectations from life and reality. 

**

A short quick read. The book connects well with Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement. What he mentions that there is little fiction talking about what we are doing to the planet. This one is a short novel about consumerism and what we are doing to the planet, and ourselves.